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One of the most important dates on the Christian calendar is Christmas, the day set aside to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. There is a 1-in-365 chance that Jesus was born on December 25, but no one knows when Jesus was born. The date is of no great significance to the life of Christ. What matters is he was lived and died, and his life and death are the root of the world’s most important religion. To Christians, the life of Jesus is the most important event in human history.
Whether Christianity is still the most important world religion is the most important part of that first paragraph, given the state of Christianity in the world. In Europe, where Christianity evolved and flourished in the Roman empire, Christianity is no longer an important part of the culture. The trappings of Christmas remain, largely for commercial reasons, but otherwise Christianity is just about gone. Islam and managerial liberalism are the most important religions in Europe.
In the United States, Christianity remains under assault by the usual suspects but remains an important part of the culture. Even in the secular regions, the cultural framework of Christianity remains in place. God has been replaced by “the tides of history” and Scripture with the latest slop from progressivism, but these things are just filling the hole left in the Christian framework. In the more normal parts of the country, Christian churches still dot the countryside.
There is no question that Christianity is on the wane in the Western world and that spells trouble for the Church globally. It is tempting to wonder if Christianity has a future at all, but the better question is what will it become in the future? The story of Christianity is survival and evolution. What we think of as Christianity today is nothing like what the early Christians experienced. Even medieval Christians would find modern Christianity to be weird and heretical.
For example, early Christians would be puzzled by the reliance on Scripture by many modern Protestant sects. The Gospels were not written until roughly a century after the life of Christ and his disciples. The first “Bible” was assembled by St. Jerome around A.D. 400 and included 27 books of the New Testament. In 382 A.D., the Council of Rome finished the process of determining the 73 books of the Bible. There were probably millions of Christians before there was a single Bible.
Then you have the fact that the Christianity that emerged from the Levant and began to spread around the Roman Empire ran into both Roman paganisms, but also the much more potent paganism of the Germanic barbarians. Many of the things we associate with Christianity were borrowed from these pagans. James C. Russell argues in his book, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, that the culture and religion of Germanic pagans shaped Christianity.
Of course, there are “Bible believing Christians” who reject these claims, but these people are practicing a form of Christianity that could not exist if not for the evolution of the Church into the late Middle Ages. It was the revolution within Christianity that gave us Protestantism and to some degree its secular partner liberalism. The dynamic between the two is a hot topic today in dissident circles. There would be no “Bible believing Christians” without this evolutionary process.
This evolution of Christianity also helps explain why it survived at all. A handful of radical Jews changed the course of human history, by creating something that has motivated men to die for their belief in it. In 303, the Roman emperor Diocletian issued a series of edicts rescinding Christians’ legal rights, setting off a decade of persecutions, just as the early Christian were beginning to codify their faith. Despite this, the Church not only survived, but became much stronger.
There is a good argument to be made that the success of Christianity was due to its struggle in the face of persecution. Early Christians had to be smart, courageous, and resourceful to maintain their religion. This selected for the sorts of people who were willing to take on the enormous challenge of maintaining, spreading, and developing a fundamentally new moral and cosmological outlook. The early Christians had to be to the far right of the bell curve.
Another way to think of it is that Christianity was a new mind virus that quickly evolved to spread among its new host. It then had to evolve even faster once it broke out of its original population. When efforts to eradicate it came, it once again evolved rapidly to adapt to the changes in its host population. Like the common cold or the flu, there are lots of variant of the original Christian virus now. In the end, they all promise the same thing for those infected.
Still another evolutionary way of thinking about how Christianity survived and thrived is that it is a mutation in human thought. Until Christianity, monotheism was limited to Jews and Zoroastrians. Universalism did not exist. These two mutations combined in Christianity and spread through the life, struggle, and death of early Christians until it became a dominant trait. The irony here is that some Christians dispute evolution, but they would not be here if evolution were not real.
The point of all this is not to rustle the sensibilities of those Christians who think the reason for the Church is it is the will and word of God. The point is that Christianity exists at all because it has adapted and survived far worse that the commercialization of Christmas and the “happy holidays” nonsense. Christianity is facing a new challenge in the West, one to which it will have to adapt, while maintaining the thing that has allowed it to survive, which is the hope and courage it provides the believer.
The reason the West is in crisis is the new religion, that which the managerial class struggles to understand, even while they are preaching it, is not able to provide an answer to the questions Christianity has always been able to answer. Those questions are “Who says?” and “Why should I listen?” Men will live and die in defense of the answers to those questions. Whatever Christianity becomes on the surface, it will thrive because it answers the most important of man’s questions.
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Many Christians like myself believe we’re in end times, so none of what we are witnessing going on in the world is a surprise. European churches have been empty for decades. Some are now libraries, coffee shops, pubs, museums and some have already been converted to Mosques. While most Europeans claim to be a ‘Christians’ it’s mostly in contrast to being non-Christian. Christmas in Europe is predominantly secular and in Germany it’s about drinking Glühwein at the Christmas markets with friends more than celebrating Christmas as the time we reflect on the birth of Jesus Christ. Celebrating Christs birth is… Read more »
Why isn’t this getting more upvotes?
Not everybody is Christian here, plus mebbe some Christians didn’t like the ‘end times’ reference. To be fair, that’s pretty hard yakka if you’re trying to raise a family, be stable and so forth. Ok sure, no problem, I’ll just tell my kids it’s the end of the world. I understand that. Unhappily, we have indeed reached the beginning pangs of the ‘tribulation’ — essentially an in-gathering of both Christians and evil. The acceleration of malice witnessed in America and elsewhere these decades past demonstrates a heightened number and quality of malevolent influences, both in organized order and in individuals.… Read more »
Like Ray, I didn’t upvote because I don’t believe we’re in “end times.” I did, however, find much to agree with in the rest of the comment. Thus no downvote.
Still, end times or not, the world does seem to be going to hell in a handbasket.
Agreed, sort of. Christians have been saying that since before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, though. And “the youth” have always been Godless heathens, at least to large swaths of the elder generations.
‘Many Christians like myself believe we’re in end times, so none of what we are witnessing going on in the world is a surprise.’
Yes. A significant portion of Scripture relates directly to our times. We are forewarned in all things.
Christianity specifically evolved as a way to deal with the existential facts of suffering, injustice, and meaningless, forgotten death. Christianity says that the Jewish tyrant Herod tried to kill Christ in the crib — and eventually the Jews, in collusion with the Romans, succeeded in humiliating and torturing him to death for exposing the hypocrisy and wickedness of the Jewish political and religious elites and exposing their moral self-righteousness as fraudulent. As hundreds, and then thousands, and then millions of people began to realize “They’d do that to me, too, and wouldn’t give it a second thought” Christianity began to… Read more »
A parallel evolution is happening with humans in general. We are going through a genetic bottleneck. Birthrates have plummeted so certain types of genes are disappearing. The genes of feminists, non-religious people and just people who aren’t into family are dying out – literally. The genes of those who want children are surviving. These are very different types of people.
In a few generations, we’ll only have the genes of those who really want to have children. They will be much more conservative, religious and family oriented. The Church will evolve to serve these people.
I so want to believe this. There are lots of children at our small church here in the Ozarks, and it’s common to see families with 2-4 towheads out eating with both parents and grandparents. But then, just last week, we saw grandparents with just one granddaughter – a mulatto. The threat of White extinction is still very real.
Very much so. But the genes of those whites having kids with other whites will not only be more conservative, they’ll likely be more ethnocentric. People naturally connect to their own, but in a multi-everything world, you have to go out of your way to mate with your own kind. Even if its unconscious, these people have a natural affinity for other whites. Those genes will get passed down.
Could be a rescue baby.
At risk of a “Bah, humbug”, there are white rescue babies available.
“…just one granddaughter – a mulatto.”
Don’t ruin your day focusing on the “mulatto” part, but rather the “one” part. Oddly enough, in cases like this, DR can focus too much on the exceptions, and not realize they are doing the same thing they scream “NAXALT” about.
Merry Christmas!
Conservative whites having more children than liberal whites is quite a recent development too. Probably not much difference until the 1990s and only really taking off in the 2010s. As the proliferation of different lifestyles takes place, people who would have been in a similar 2.5 kids white picket fence life a generation ago are now on diverging paths. One could even wonder if whites are splitting off into different ethnic groups. I don’t feel any self loathing for my heritage, nor do i idolize homosexuals, nor am i fascinated by foreign cultures. I don’t believe it’s just taught, i… Read more »
We are nothing like white Leftists because we are not mutants.
Keep in mind that blacks, Muslims and Hispanics are more into having kids than whites overall. While the rest of the planet is threatened by a population collapse, Africa is growing by leaps and bounds and most want to live in your neighborhood.
But you are right that the greater birthrate among bad whites will change the culture assuming the Jews don’t succeed in subverting that trend by successfully proselytizing their ideology to the young especially young women.
I’m inclined to disagree regarding blacks. They aren’t so much into family as they are just irresponsible. But even that is changing as universally, staring into one’s cell phone has become more mesmerizing than procreating. Not fast enough, unfortunately.
It’s going to be impossible to stop the general subversion trend by our Greatest Friends and Allies. We European Gentiles must learn to develop immunity – to become Parasite Proof.
If you follow Birth Gauge on Twitter, Black total fertility was lower than White total fertility for the first time ever in 2023.
And African immigrants bring the average up. African Americans are below whites. However, about 10% of white women produce a mixed baby.
But yeah, overall the black fertility rate is no longer high. Black women are just choosing to be single and childless instead of navigating single motherhood, unless they’re really low class.
The issue isn’t just blacks, of course. Back in Texas, most Indian and Chinese families (and there were a ton) had three kids – and often more until they had a boy. The mestizos (Mexicans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, etc.) had a minimum of three – and I’m talking LONG before 2020 and Biden’s Willkommen. There was a public school down the block from the private Christian school my oldest attended in the late ’90s – and it was almost entirely mestizo.
We can take some solace in the fact that the negro’s greatest joy is 86ing other negroes.
Am I the only one who thinks that “Zorro, the Lesser Z man” is the coolest internet moniker I’ve ever come across? Bravo!
<i>The Gospels were not written until roughly a century after the life of Christ and his disciples.</i>
Ah yes!! The Jesuit mal-education comes to the fore. That particular gross error has been proven wrong for roughly 40 years. Reality? Matthew was almost immediate; Mark & Luke were finished by A.D. 50, and John’s by A.D. 100.
Merry Christmas to your bah/humbug.
Not to mention the Septuagint was widely available in the common tongue, and the early apostles were quite adept at quoting it and applying it in their apologetics. The fact that Christ’s virgin birth was one of many fulfilled prophesies (from scripture) strengthened the argument that Jesus was the Messiah. And then there’s the inconvenient fact of how we get a New Testament anyway. The reason we have all the epistles is because the early churches knew the value in sound doctrine and in preserving the texts. They held onto the letters from Paul and the other apostles, and made… Read more »
The fact that Christ’s virgin birth was one of many fulfilled prophesies (from scripture) strengthened the argument that Jesus was the Messiah. The Hebrew text reads almah (young woman) not bethulah (virgin) at Isaiah 7:14. The former word was mistranslated as parthenos (virgin) by the people who prepared the Septuagint, which isn’t authoritarive in Israelite religion but appears to have acquired some absurd amount of reverence in ancient times among people who didn’t know much Hebrew. Also, the passage in Isaiah doesn’t even relate to the messiah prophesy of Israel. It’s about events and circumstances contemporary to Ahaz, so even… Read more »
The hebrew/masoretic text was compiled around the year 1000AD by jews hostile to Christ and Christians. It is not to be trusted. On the other hand, the Septuagint was put together the third century before the birth of Christ and is what Christ and his Apostles quoted. FTR, the Septuagint was in greek, greek was the common language in the levant at that time. Some spoke aramaic, but greek was what most used and is the original language of the New Testament.
So put all this hebrew text quoting in the trash bin, where it belongs.
Yes, Z made a mistake. The principal texts of the Hebrew prophets and their schools, plus the NT accounts, all were complete within a century of Christ’s life, with Patmos John finishing-up in Revelation. Here is just one incident from Jeshua’s travels — ‘And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read. ‘And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was… Read more »
Don’t be too harsh on him, it’s a common error. The biggest argument against the error is that none of the Gospels make any mention of the Temple’s destruction by Hadrian, despite the fact that it’s the final nail in the coffin to the opponents of Christ.
The writers of the NT sought to transmit mostly spiritual information — matters immediately of interest to the various scattered churches.
Historical matters of the moment were the arena of secular historians.
Dad,
Wrong, that’ exactly Jesuit teaching…..
Christianity began and thrived also because Christ rose from the dead, did we forget this part? So all the talk of a church dying or fading away based on a guy who defeated death is a little awkward. So there’s that.
One of the reasons the early Catholic Church thrived was it proscribed abortion, and saved unwanted children the Romans had left exposed to die, baptising the babies and raising them as their own. All life was treasured by God. See the Didache. Something similar is happening today. Ed Dutton has written on the demographics of this. Attend a Traditional Latin Mass and you will see many babies and the ladies in dresses. The TLM orders enjoy 6X the vocations for the priesthood as the Novus Order orders and dioceses. This despite the nonsense from Francis in Rome, soon to end.… Read more »
Hence the growth of the Amish population from about 5,000 to more than half a million in little more than a century…And the Amish are becoming even more Amish through the “boiling off” process (Cochran and Harpending) as those not happy with Amish life are graciously bidden adieu..
I know from a retired priest that Bergoglio not only disapproves of the Tridentine Right, but is down right hostile to it. I attend because it has a deep spiritual, as well as a learning aspect to it. Now I have the added benefit of giving a man I roundly despise the finger in the process. A very blessed and Merry Christmas to you all!
Nothing brings on that yuletide glow quite like flipping the double eagle to Il Papa!
You have a knack for stating things in a way that is vividly illuminating.
Grazie.
Working ith more catholics lately. I was promised Latin and nuns with rulers, kinda disappointed.
The churches have nobody to blame but themselves for the, hopefully temporary, collapse of Christianity in the West. There are many “Christian” churches who preach the gospel of the corp HR dept.
For today’s clericy, Christianity is Leftist subversion or it is nothing. In other words, for such people, Christianity is nothing more than a vehicle for the Left’s ongoing destruction of the West. In point of fact, I believe most “Christian” clergy are at most, agnostic, and more likely atheistic. Some of them, what’s more, are Satanic.
The main assault by the enemies of Christianity is to attempt to redefine it into something it isn’t.
Yes. Like beware those wolves in sheep’s clothing. Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. Sadly, the wolves are running the sheep pen. I saw a picture of a “wedding” in a Church of England “church” where the “priest” was a female and lesbian of course, “marrying” obvious trannies looking like weirdos. That is the point. To make… Read more »
I converted to Catholicism in large part because of the… non-Biblical elements of it, the philosophical tradition, the Magisterium, the “scripture in light of tradition”, all made more sense to me than what I learned growing up in a Pentacostal household. If things that Thomas Aquinas or Augustine said still resonate with people hundreds of years later, there is no reason to think that is going to stop. The best Satan can do is work to try to get people not to read or learn about Augustine or Aquinas. Sure, he has done very well on that front in the… Read more »
Interesting. Aquinas was the reason I decided the Catholics had lost the way.
After spending the better part of a decade on Aquinas, when I saw The Life of Brian, I perceived all the schisms of the early church in living color. We can’t count on manmade doctrine and dogma, but rather on what He is reported to have said, and the Septuagint, the only part of the Bible He got to proofread.
Michelle Houellbecq’s book “Submission” was a good, if depressing look at a near future France rapidly being overtaken by the religion of Peace.
The atheist, hedonistic protagonist sees there’s a problem, tries to reconnect with Catholicism, but is unable to for many reasons which are depressing and sad (hey, it’s French writing)
Ultimately gives up, joins Islam, gets a couple of wives.
Nature abhors a vacuum; men and women always back the strong horse.
Expect resistance in France, Germany and elsewhere in the EU and the UK. Immigration policies have demonstrated the futility and non-responsiveness of the European Union. Hungary and others in the vanguard will demonstrate that there is sanity even amongst the silliness and delusion.
Because he writes in French, Houellbecq is probably the most underrated and underestimated author by folks in the Anglosphere.
There is no other modern author who so brilliantly evokes and analyzes the ennui of existence in the Current Year GAE.
I am glad you guys appreciate the Jew Huallenbeq
“The Gospels were not written until roughly a century after the life of Christ and his disciples.”
This is not really accurate. The Gospels were written within a few decades after the death of Christ by His living disciples, such as Matthew, John and Peter, or by those who spoke directly with His living disciples, such as Mark, Luke and Paul.
While this clarification is not central to Zman’s point, it is important to note that the gospels are first hand accounts, and not second or third hand accounts written after the direct witnesses were dead.
I attend a conservative christian assembly 99% white, where men lead the congregation and women have traditional roles. I notice that a lot of young couples are having children.
Purple hairs do not have as many children, I think Ed Dutton spoke about this and how evolution will gradually select for the religious over the secular.
I’m glad to hear you have a church faithful to God.
The various Christian denominations need to ditch the “religion” of universalism and DEI as well as allowing women and various sexual deviants into the priesthood and church upper echelons. The old traditions need to be resurrected as it were.
All the new-agey stuff since the 20th century is people looking for meaning. Anti-materialism and all. This is the void Christianity left.
Prosperity gospel, trying to be cool, look like own goals, and maybe so. OTOH, the carnage of the 20th could’ve been a mortal wound.
It’s a tough spot. I lean towards another Reformation of sorts. That might be possible now because of demographic turnover. More people today are disillusioned with current world than the one that died a century ago.
Interestingly, they never seem to adopt an Amish-like, Western-rooted lifestyle in their search for meaning.
The West lost faith in itself, and why not? Destroyed itself for God and Country.
Faith and nationalism need a serious reworking, because they failed in the last century. Obviously, there’s no future without them.
The sad truth is Lefty is still the heart of the West. She’s done her best in the absence of men, but she’s a train wreck on her own.
One Thanksgiving, the Zman celebrated the courage and intelligence of the Puritans; this season, he celebrates the resilience and hopefulness of the Christians. I really do like these uplifting pieces, they are kind-hearted, a shelter and a solace amidst the din.
Merry Christmas to you!
Some behaviors are encoded in DNA and embody our most fundamental proclivities and essential habits (breathing for example). One of these is known as the “common good” allegiance gene. It is an instinctive reflect response to band together in times of great hardship or immediate threat (strength in numbers). The initial response in automatic, but sustained allegiance requires a shared set of core beliefs and group trust in those beliefs. This is the mental habit and bond that ensures cooperation and sacrifice. The eternal wisdom embodied in Christianity works, and therefore persists.
The numbers don’t lie though – it is largely the Christians, zealous Christians, who are reproducing. I think we will see American Christianity change pretty thoroughly in the next few decades, but I think that change will be a bending back towards ancient Christianity, rather than morphing into something new.
Admittedly, I was pursuing Orthodox Christianity before I awoke on this side of politics, so I have a clear bias in this regard.
I have been going back to the church of my youth for a while now. It is pretty fundamental in some ways and felt legalistic growing up; now you can see the children have been leaving for a generation or two and the pews are filled with African migrants. The conversation inside the church seems divided between the old school that want to hold an unrealistic standard of behavior, and the younger folks that want to relax standards—but the only alternative they seem to be looking at is generic liberalism, with female pastors, refugees and LGBTQ ‘acceptance’. While the old… Read more »
I would characterize the evolution of Christianity as mostly a process of making peace and allying with secular rulers…For instance, reincarnation was a fundamental belief of Essenes like Jesus, and is referred to in the Bible, but it made the rulers nervous and was deemed heretical by the 4th century Church….Similarly, a decentralized early Christianity became much more hierarchical in order to deal with the demands of secular rulers..
Why, Z!!! What errant rot! You should be ashamed of yourself! The last guys that stamped out Christianity were the Soviets. Look at Russia now. Before them it was an endless procession of fascists, moslems, Romans, Assyrians, Ottomans…and worst of all, ruthless grifters right smack dab in the Vatican itself. Christisnity is not going to fall to intellectual derelicts like faggots, pedos and expendable and disposable politicians. The only reason these people have the upper hand now is that we live in artificially sustained prosperity in a bubble that is about to burst. The old nickel goes that there are… Read more »
Did you read the post or is this a joke I am not getting?
Yes I shot my face off without reading it all… Uggghhh.
Ignore me.
Hrrrrmmmmm…. now that I think about it… this is all YOUR fault!
You need to put a delete button on your blog so that retards like me can delete their own foolishness before anyone can see it! 🙂
Hope your Christmas is good and that you have some good times lined up for the family.
It’s amusing to watch someone step on their own dick.
But for the grace of God go I…
Puh-leez! It’s “his own dick.”
That’s not a grammar nazi thing. If we adopt the leftist framing, we lose eventually.
The idea of a shared dick is something that suggests a lesbian commune. “Who left the dildo on the floor where it could be stepped on?”
There are scholars who think the Bible, and the NT in particular, are the product of an elite Greek literary class:
https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Early-Christian-Literature-Contextualizing-ebook/dp/B08K3NVXTZ/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=H8T5N&content-id=amzn1.sym.bc3ba8d1-5076-4ab7-9ba8-a5c6211e002d&pf_rd_p=bc3ba8d1-5076-4ab7-9ba8-a5c6211e002d&pf_rd_r=139-3922762-0609318&pd_rd_wg=yXKhc&pd_rd_r=7a767144-292e-4e2e-aaf7-8670c2f2db9d&ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk
The future of Christianity lies in China. It will die here and live on there.
Just threw a dart at a map of the world to complete the sentence “The future of Christianity lies in…”, or might you care to elaborate?
Don’t downvote the guy. He may be right. Christianity has filled a void in China (and Korea, big time) that Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and then Communism left. They are taking to Christianity like a duck to water. Same thing with classical music. East Asians love those things Westerners have tossed aside. On a personal note, I have never met more “crazy Christians” than East Asians. They make Jimmy Swaggart look like Gore Vidal. Korean megachurches make Texas megachurches look like sleepy Greek Orthodox chapels. Remember the guy who thought he could convert the South Sentinelese to Christ, then got murdered… Read more »
A supermajority of Chinese are atheists. There are about as many Chinese Christians per capita as there are American Jews. In China, however, the Christians have little influence. The official churches toe the Party’s line as assiduously as the established churches of Europe. Unofficial churches in people’s homes, etc. survive by not drawing too much attention to themselves.
I visited Taiwan not long ago and was surprised at the amount of “Merry Christmas” signage you could see, much more than i typically see here in the states. Given that Christians are <5% of the population it was funny to compare it to the push against public displays here—as long as you’re a tiny minority, you can publicly celebrate your holidays?
Christmas is big around SE Asia. They enjoy the festivities, but these are as bereft of religious significance as an Irving Berlin Christmas composition.
This. And same goes for non-Whites in AINO – I knew Iranian, Indian, and Chinese families – all non-Christians – who had trees, stockings, outdoor lights, the whole shebang. They wholeheartedly adopted the post WWII “American” holiday, with absolutely no spiritual meaning whatsoever.
As with many things East Asian, they love a good excuse to buy and eat. Also there’s a unique aesthetic which they can wear for a few days and take pictures.
Relatedly, possibly: The only non-Catholic young Christian white person I know goes to “Korean church.” I don’t know what that means. Where we live there aren’t enough Koreans to fill a church, and the few I know are devotees of the cult of “woke” managerialism, because they were good students and they’re rich now. They do regime things, not religious things. They have TVs and talk about what’s on them. Apparently there’s a fad among the kids, the white female kids, to join the “Korean church” in America. She said it to me with that admitting to succumbing to a… Read more »
That is the first time I’ve seen “emotive” and “East Asian” used in the same paragraph, let alone sentence.
The Koreans have a long history of Korean Martyrs, look it up.
Sure – just like classical music, amirite? Copying something because it’s seen as high status is a far cry from organic creation of and belief in something. Plenty of Koreans claim to be Christian, too – but despite the faith’s ‘universalist’ message, they set up their own, ethnic churches here in the US, and they still prioritize male births. I am a believing Christian . . . and the brain and rationality God gave me shows me that genes and ethnicity are at least equal to faith in shaping how people live.
I don’t think there is any conflict between ethnic churches and Catholic universalism. People need to see Jesus where they are, and in a strange land that needs to be a place that speaks their language, literally. Ethnic churches eventually fade away as the future generations become more integrated (note I did not say assimilated) to the American project. I’ve seen this happen, people grow up in ethnic churches but after striking out on their own attend “regular” ones where the liturgy is in English.
I disagree. Many of these churches are second generation and growing – new buildings, etc. Even worse, many of them began by buying formerly White churches where the congregation aged out and just stopped attending. I watched it happen. Also note the Taiwanese Chinese establish their churches separate from the mainland Chinese, etc. It’s total ethnic isolationism, not finding Jesus ‘where they are.’
Man, 3g4me, I knew you were off the rails a long time ago when you said that the Chinese girl’s classical piano performance, which won some competitions, lacked something compared to a European performance. Sorry that the “chinks” made sure that their kids learned classical music that your spawn couldn’t be bothered to. On your children, if you closed your eyes, swear that you would have been able to tell the difference. I am sure you are delusional enough to say yes. If it wasn’t for the Vietnamese community in my neck of the woods, every one of the inner… Read more »
When POTUS Trump called Don Lemon, another lovely La product, the dumbest person in America, he had not met 3g4me
That’s a bit harsh. She’s just been so blackpilled that it appears to be hard to see a silver lining in any cloud. It’s probably irrational to let yourself get so worked up about stuff you can’t do anything about.
I do have some sympathy for what you are saying, though. There is a small splinter of traditionalist Lutheran clergy who might be able to pull the fat out of the fire, and if the Methodists can be saved, it’s Africans in Africa. Catholics, probably not. Definitely not at scale.
Fair enough sir. I have always told my kids that their energy would better spent on bettering oneself and correcting one’s own flaws. The good Lord knows I have way too many flaws to keep track of. Talking about how other people are crappy is counter productive. It is ok to acknowledge other races in a non derogatory light and still focus on my own people. As a proud Catholic, I have hope for us and the Orthodox more than the protestant denominations….BUT I hope they succeed also rather than assuming they won’t.
I, too, hope for the best. I just fear that Catholicism is too deeply rooted in the relatively recent principle of ex cathedra. In retrospect, many of the doctrines put in place were in error, but until Catholics reject papal infallibility, and essentially become Protestants with better hats and sense of architecture, I’m pretty sure most will be led into error.
Yeah, I know Tridentine Mass is a Middle Ages thing, so we can’t talk about it as early church tradition. At some point, we have to accept that anything created by man is flawed, and that includes papal bulls.
lookit this faggot, pretending to know what _ex cathedra_ means
Do you need me to explain it to you?
The “only ones keeping Christianity alive” reminds me of the handful of white Canadians who have taken it upon themselves to carve new totems for an Amerindian band living along a stretch of coast in British Columbia. Apparently the elders have neglected this, and their extant totems have rotted in the wet climate. It doesn’t bode well for the perpetuation of their culture. Twenty survivalist families in the Ozarks is better than they’ve got.
A congregation of a 1000 in the church a half mile from my house that is full. every Sunday morning with Moms/Dads/multiple kids per family/Grandmas and Grandmas. is a heck of a lot better than 20 survivalist families. And this is not the only one. A handful of families had the courage to move in to the blight and gentrified entire neighborhoods in half a generation. The houses are glowing currently with Christmas lights and crosses. It is wonderful.
I very much doubt it that it will die here and live on there. But it will live on there as well as here. Jesus gave his disciples the Great Commission. The Great Commission in simple terms was for his disciples to go out and preach the Gospel to the four corners of the world. But He didn’t say anything about sponsoring mass movements of people to move from one corner of the world and invade the living space of people in another corner of the world.
I don’t know. What I learned in school was that Christianity developed and spread as a form of Judaism with a more conciliatory God, and because monotheism became regarded as more sophisticated and less barbarian than paganism and the polytheistic predecessors. When I look back, all I can see and say is that the monotheistic claims of the Big 3, in particular of Christianity, are pretty much bogus, with all those sons, mothers, saints and prophets added, we might as well have stuck to the Greek and Roman Gods in that regard. And the track record of all 3 in… Read more »